Bambu support replied to my support ticket. Not much clarity on the solution but they have put in place stricter guidelines to prevent this from occurring on future spools they receive. They are sending me a new roll.
Bottom line there is no solution to the ones that are already out there. Will have to wait and see if the tighter quality control has any improvement. For me I will be extra careful when running prints close to the end of a roll, which sort of defeats the purpose of the AMS auto-refill. I am going to look into an auto re-spooler as well, it may just have to be part of my system. I have also had a few refills get tangled up in the AMS because occasionally there is a gap between the filament and the walls of the spool. So after a few load unload sequences the filament falls in that gap and gets stuck. Respooling I’m hoping will solve both issues for me.
On my initial email they didn’t state anything. Asking for further clarification for potential future issues they stated:
“…added some tools to assist our staff in applying the tape correctly, and, for PLA Basic, the previous problems were mainly with black, white and grey, and the other colours should only be occasional, so please don’t worry”…
My filament roll was orange so, that doesn’t make me feel any better. They will also replace filament if it occurs in the future, just need to send them the SN of the roll. Again no rea way to prevent it from happening other than keeping an eye when a roll nears the end. It also looks like you can check to see if the filament is tucked into the cardboard roll before loading it into the spool holder.
That looks totally new to me. I haven’t seen that kind of tape yet.
The tail caught under tape for about a 1/4 to 3/8” looks like the “new method” but photos and the spools I’ve seen use black tape and you’re showing what looks like a kind of strapping/reinforced tape.
Maybe they are trying to find tape that lets go of the filament tail easier and without transferring adhesive to the filament?
I had 2 refill spools with black tape eat up some of my machines last week. One tried to go through my ams and got jammed and the other lodged itself halfway through my bowden tube on my non ams machine. So lost both prints a bowden tube (Had to cut it to get it out) and some AMS service time.
Bambu support said have $10 off your next order lol. Maybe stop taping the spools instead!
Just to add to @Johnny_Bit post.
$10 is not enough.
Looking on the Bambu Lab site for spare parts.
A First Stage Feeder = £32.99.
PTFE Tubes = £3.99
AMS Internal Hub Unit = £30.99
All these parts can be damaged by tape being pulled through them.
Every time you have a problem with tape being pulled into your AMS, put a ticket in.
This problem is damaging your AMS. They will just never say it is.
Exactly. And even when/if they do stop using tape, there will be lots of spools in their inventory with it waiting to clog someone else’s AMS or extruder.
Then, there will still be spools in users’ own local inventory.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Bambu won’t want those spools returned and won’t want to respool them all. They will just keep getting shipped out to unwary customers.
It’s pretty amazing Bambu doesn’t consider this a critical black eye to be fixed and customers made whole. Instead, they seem content to let customers discover all this for themselves, ruin hardware and cause damage and down time.
Especially with other color printers hitting that use the same licensed technology, I would have thought Bambu would want to distinguish themselves with superior products and responsive customer service. Instead, they’ve dug themselves a nice hole.
Thankfully it’s no problem (usually) for people who watch their printers and prints closely. But it’s a big problem for those with farms or doing unattended printing and think all spools will properly switch over.
But the Bambu printers are meant to be easy to use and you don’t have to stand near them. That’s why they have the app and the camera feed, isn’t it.
When I’m doing a print I don’t want to be stood over it. I just want to send it to the printer and monitor it by the slicer software and the camera feed every now and then.
For a company that make really good printers, it’s a shame that they don’t care about their customers damaging their AMS units by using their filaments.
I agree completely. I think Bambu is really shooting themselves in the foot with this. It’s the kind of thing that will certainly cost them some number of filament customers and maybe even printer customers.
But it’s their company. I can continue using their filament because I sit near the printer and can just look over but I totally get that others may not want to be that tied down. Workflows and numbers of printers can make it impractical.
Support has agreed to one time refund or send me new spool(s) over this issue. My last 20 refills of black pla have all done the same thing. At first the tape applied across the filament, the latest batch of ten was all applied lengthwise to the filament. All black tape.
I am asking for new rolls, but I am not sure how many they will send.
They said they still have inventory of the affected product and can not guarantee that new rolls will work correctly.
My advice, if you experience this, put in a ticket and record the result so you have a video. The more Bambu has to replace or refund for this issue, the more likely they are to find a good fix.
This is different from what @SupportAssistant in post 126 where they stated “Please note that the tape issue has happened for a small number of spools in a batch.”
This states that they know the batch numbers, so shouldn’t send out any spools that are defective… Unless its all just waffle to distract the customers that they just don’t have a clue…
I’m still pretty fresh to the printer…can you clarify what taped “correctly” is? I’ve got a spool about to run out, I can see that it’s taped, but I don’t know how AMS is supposed to work. Should it feed in the the end smoothly or get a little tug from the taped roll? Clearly ingesting the tape is bad and I plan on watching it with snips in hand, but would like to understand what the expected behavior is before it causes a problem.
